Green Options

This is a guest submission from John Addison, Publisher of the Clean Fleet Report.

My ninth trip to teach a workshop at Two World Trade Center never happened because of the great tragedy 9/11. On September 11, 2001, thanks to heroes like Avel Villanueva the hundreds of people working for Sun Microsystems in Two World Trade Center all quickly evacuated the building and survived. “Please, with calmness, go to the nearest exit. This is not a drill. Get out.” Only after several pages and inspecting the vast 25th and 26th floors did Avel personally leave. Three minutes later the second plane hit Two World Trade Center.

As our current president reminds us, “We are addicted to oil.” As we continue to spend billions for oil for countries hostile to our way of life, we continue in the words of Thomas Friedman to “finance both sides of the war on terror.” In his new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, the Pulitzer Prize winning author shows us how to be free of this addiction.

Americans are not waiting ten years to replace a fraction of our foreign oil with new oil from Alaska. Americans are reducing our oil use now. Confronted with high prices at the pump, U.S. citizens drove 12 billion fewer miles in one month. People are taking advantage of flexwork, public transit, car pooling, sharing rides and sharing vehicles.

With a rapidly dwindling popularity rating, and under severe pressure from voters as UK petrol (gasoline) prices exceed $8 per gallon, Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s labour government has recently canceled a proposed increase in fuel taxes.

During the past 5 years, Americans have done a lot of talking about our oil addiction. In that same time period, oil suppliers (aka pushers) have had an amazing run of economic success. There are now major efforts underway by the suppliers to tell us not to worry our little heads about how much money is flowing out of our pockets and into theirs. They are also spending a lot of advertising dollars on a campaign to tell us how hard they are working to provide us with the products to which we are addicted.

The spectacle that has really gotten me concerned is watching our leading addicts - the people who spend a lot of time flying around in jets, helicopters, and armored convoys - consuming vast quantities of oil jetting over to the turf where the key suppliers live to convince them to pump enough new product so that we can go back to being contented, satisfied junkies with slightly lower monthly costs of supporting our habit.

Of course, you have heard some good advice from many people about how to reduce your own dependence and you might have even read some decent advice about how the whole country can work to reduce its habit to more manageable levels. What you have not heard much about, however, is a prescription that has the potential for completely fracturing the power of the pushers and stopping the unbalanced flow of money that has distorted the world’s system of production and rewards.

My preferred solution is the one offered by President Eisenhower, a man who knew a bit about the benefits of negotiating from a position of strength.

The phrase “oil addiction” has been uttered and written countless times since George W. Bush used it in his 2006 State of the Union address. While many still rightly question the current President’s commitment to ending US dependence on oil, David Sandalow, assistant secretary of state and senior director on the National Security Council during the Clinton administration, notes that the concept of “oil addiction,” and the failure to address it substantively, both predate the current administration. His new book, Freedom from Oil: How the Next President Can End the United States’ Oil Addiction, traces the use of the phrase back to the Nixon administration, and observes that every president since has struggled with the concept… and ultimately failed to do anything to address it.

Despite his political leanings, though, Sandalow’s purpose in Freedom from Oil isn’t to criticize the current administration, or to bemoan the overall lack of progress in lessening American dependence on oil. Rather, he sets a much more daunting challenge for himself: illustrate how the US can overcome its dependence on this resource that’s responsible for environmental damage, security concerns, and economic indebtedness to some of the world’s most unsavory governments. In presenting his ideas, Sandalow deftly illustrates the depth of our oil addiction… and the complex circumstances any administration will have to address in order to set the country on a path towards a low-carbon energy future.